A Tiny Startup’s Plot to Beat Google at Big Data (opens in new tab)

The thing that's missing from this article (which is relevant to this crowd) is the incredible focus on simplicity of Keen's API. Keen's API for reporting metrics is the right one. Any Keen SDK has essentially one API call for reporting metrics:

    keen.add_event("collection_name", {
        "arbitrary": "dictionary properties",
        "with_any_type": -11.23
    })

For developers accustomed to instrumenting their applications with various metrics libraries, this is akin to finding the holy grail. Most APIs for metrics collection require you to decide up front what metrics you want, whether it is a time series or a count or a gauge or a ratio. And even after you've figured _that_ out, there is a combinatorial explosion of different metric collections you have to create for every combination of filters that interest you.

For the developer, Keen's API is so powerful because it lets you defer almost all of your "question-asking" until later (which is when you want to think about it anyways because you can never predict up front all of the questions you want to ask about your data).

When I began to evaluate options for monitoring ngrok's usage and performance, Keen struck me both for getting the abstraction right, and because I have watched company after company dump countless amounts of money and developer time into homegrown analytics systems that materialize either too late or far over budget.

Disclaimers:

- I am Keen customer for ngrok.com (https://ngrok.com/status)

- Compelled by the power of their product, and the competence of their team, I now work for Keen.

As inaccurate titles go, this is a exemplary one. Other than that, a nice if fluffy overview of Keen. The "data" space is getting incredibly complicated and it will be interesting to see who finds a profitable niche.

Why not a more automatic approach like http://heapanalytics.com? Their js snippet starts automatically collecting all click events, then I group and analyze events on their website.

How is this "big data" when I have to make backend code changes to manually add each event using keen's api library? There's no way I can get as many events adding them one-by-one.

Keen is one of those companies like GitHub, Heroku, or Mailchimp that makes it easier to focus on what I'm actually trying to do. Best of luck to them.

Keen has a great team, and some great ideas + technology. They were on it back at the Techstars Cloud program, and glad to see them getting some press these days. Kyle and Ryan are both wonderful to talk to about big data problems. Keep up the good work guys!

Beat Google at Big Data? OK, great sneaky way to put "Beat Google at X" in a headline.. too bad Google's business isn't primarily about providing tools in X (and if it is, it's probably < 0.01% of their focus/revenue).

Keen seems awesome, except I have a high volume startup with no funding and no revenue right now. We'd blow past the 50k event/month within the first few days for sure.

I really wish there was a more affordable way to do this. Though, I guess you get what you pay for.

It actually reminds me of Mixpanel. Both are too expensive for my liking :(

.. tomorrow around 9am .. Google buys KeenIO for $900 million.

The thing I like most about Keen IO is their team. They are very open and would help anyone who finds their way to their Hipchat room.

The Next Big Thing You Missed: A Tiny Startup’s Plot to Be Purchased by Google